United they stand

YANG XIAOGUANG has hardly taken a day off all summer. The vice-president of Zhongshan University has been working frantically on two big projects: the imminent opening of his university's second campus and its expected merger with Zhongshan Medical Sciences University. The new campus in Zhuhai is due to open today, and the merger could be formally announced at any moment.

Both projects symbolise the status of Zhongshan University, based in Guangzhou and founded by Dr Sun Yat-sen in 1924, as one of 100 mainland education institutions officially designated as 'key'. Resources are being concentrated on these schools, and it is hoped 10 of them will achieve world-class status by 2005.

All of this is part of a massive shake-up of higher education on the mainland that will see the emergence of a few giant universities. No fewer than 612 smaller mainland colleges have merged into 250 bigger institutions over the past seven years, and nearly 260 have done so this year. Similar bigger-is-better reforms are attracting attention in Hong Kong.

Mr Yang is optimistic about his university's merger plans. 'Our merger with Zhongshan Medical Sciences University will lead to resource sharing,' he says. 'We are strong in sciences such as physics, chemistry and biology but relatively weak in applied studies. So the merger will be mutually beneficial.'

Zhongshan's new campus is also part of the plan to build bigger universities. Located in Tang Jia Wan in the Zhuhai Special Economic Zone north of Macau, it covers 3.4 square kilometres and is probably the largest university campus on the mainland. The new campus, which cost about 600 million yuan (about HK$565 million) to build, will accommodate 4,000 students this year and 12,000 by 2005. It opens to great fanfare today, with top officials from the Ministry of Education and the provincial government on hand.

The aim of the mainland's education reforms is to achieve economies of scale, essential if the country is to educate more people more efficiently. Not only does the national government want to increase university enrolment in preparation for the Information Age, but it also faces a student boom, an echo of the years before strict family-planning policies took hold. A bulge is working its way through the education system: the primary-school population has already peaked, and the lower-secondary-school population should peak next year, according to a government report prepared for the World Education Forum in Senegal in April. Demographic pressure on the nation's universities can be expected to increase.

This bumper crop of students will be arriving on university campuses just as the higher-education system is attempting to deal with the effects of a missing generation of professors. During the Cultural Revolution, schools became embroiled in 'making revolution' and teachers were persecuted. Universities shut down entirely for five years and then only reopened to admit worker, soldier and peasant students. Not a single masters degree or doctorate was awarded for 13 years, which means the mainland lacks qualified professors and researchers aged 30 to 50.

Money is an additional problem. The Government had pledged to double state spending on education to four per cent of gross national product (GNP) by this year, but as of 1998, the latest year for which figures are available, public spending on education had shrunk relatively, to 2.55 per cent of GNP from 2.86 per cent in 1991. The Government had also pledged that education spending would rise to at least 15 per cent of the national budget, but that has not happened either. Instead, spending shrank to 12.3 per cent of the budget in 1998 from 14.5 per cent in 1991.

But this fiscal pinch is not as serious as it might initially appear. Governments worldwide are working to build alternative sources of education funding, and the mainland is no exception. In 1988, authorities in Beijing decided to begin supplementing the national government's education spending with revenue raised through education taxes, tuition charges, school-run enterprises and fund-raising activities. As a result, national-government funds supplied just 68.9 per cent of total education spending in 1998, down from 84.5 per cent in 1991. Over the same period, however, overall spending on education more than tripled, to 294.1 billion yuan from 73.15 billion yuan.

Faced with this delicate combination of factors - an increasingly interconnected world in which education takes on growing importance, a rising tide of university-age students, an acute shortage of academic staff and a budgetary crunch - the authorities in Beijing responded in 1998 by launching the plan to merge smaller schools into larger ones, funnel resources into 100 key institutions, and build at least 10 world-class universities by 2005.

The first prototype university created by merger was launched in September 1998, when New Zhejiang University was created by bringing together four colleges in the area: Hangzhou University, Zhejiang Agricultural University, Zhejiang Medical Sciences University and the former Zhejiang University. The new university, with more than 30,000 students and 10,000 staff, is thought to be the largest institution of higher education in Asia. Its Communist Party secretary is a former vice-director of the Hong Kong branch of Xinhua, Zhang Junsheng.

Talk of merging small schools into bigger ones is music to at least some ears in Hong Kong, Cheng Kai-ming's among them. The pro-vice-chancellor of the University of Hong Kong - and a core member of the Education Commission, which is advising the SAR Government on education reform - would eventually like to see such mergers in Hong Kong, but only after a credit-transfer or voucher system is in place, giving students greater choice over where to pursue their studies and so forcing universities to become more competitive.

'Hong Kong is a small place. Universities could be merged into a big system like the University of California at Los Angeles, which has branches in different areas,' he told the Post in June. 'Colleges of a different nature, such as a research school and a polytechnic, could be merged as one mega university. Universities of the same kind could form a mega research school.'

One of Professor Cheng's colleagues - Cheung Kwok-wah, the associate dean of the University of Hong Kong's Faculty of Education - believes less drastic measures could reduce duplication among Hong Kong's numerous colleges and universities. Efficiency could be improved just by co-operating more, he says. For example, the Institute of Education is for the first time allowing maths and computer-science students to take certain courses at the University of Science and Technology this year. 'This is a good example of resource sharing.'

Mr Cheung is sceptical about the success in Hong Kong of giant university mergers similar to those being undertaken on the mainland. They would face massive opposition here, he says. 'It is nearly impossible for the Hong Kong Government, which lacks a mandate, to take such tough decisions as demanding that universities merge.'

With this, he has put his finger on a notable difference in the way the two places operate. Mainland authorities can institute reforms by issuing a circular, an approach that would never work in Hong Kong. Here, Mr Cheung says, outspoken commentators such as Wong Yuk-man, founder of the disbanded Mad Dog Daily and now chairman of the CyberDaily, could be expected to organise opposition. 'If universities being forced to coalesce appealed to the media and public opinion, I am sure Wong Yuk-man would sympathise with them.'

One should not assume, however, that everyone on the mainland is entirely happy with the mergers. Some mainland academics have described them as 'experiments in giantism' and 'legacies of the central-planning mentality'. Lei Qiang, a professor at the Centre for Hong Kong and Macau Studies at the likely-to-merge Zhongshan University, warns that universities should not merge mindlessly, 'like a swarm of bees'.

Pang Yunhe, president of the already-merged New Zhejiang University, says some merged institutions have suffered from intramural squabbling. One merger - between Tianjin University and Nankai University - was even called off because neither institution was willing to give up its name.

Mainland authorities have been using their discretion to change the balance of funding among universities, diverting extra money to key institutions and those earmarked for world-class status. For example, Beijing University and Tsinghua University recently received billions of yuan extra from the Ministry of Education, and Fudan University and Shanghai Jiaotong University each received 1.2 billion yuan from the ministry and Shanghai's municipal government. 'Mainland authorities do not hesitate to provide extra funds to speed the development of universities that have performed well,' says the University of Hong Kong's Mr Cheung, who is also a core member of the Centre for Research on Education in China.

Zhongshan University's Mr Yang says the key universities have approval from the Ministry of Education to disburse special subsidies to academic staff. Professors stand to receive more than 20,000 yuan extra a year, a welcome supplement to the standard monthly wage of less than 2,000 yuan.

Again, Mr Cheung of the University of Hong Kong says that differential funding along these lines would be difficult to implement in the SAR, where the Government-appointed University Grants Committee approves all funding for Hong Kong's seven universities.

'On the mainland, officials are determined to make such decisions if they believe them to be in the overall best interest of society - even disregarding questions about fairness; and I'm not saying it is good or bad - but it is unimaginable that the SAR Government could behave in this manner,' Mr Cheung says.

Authorities on the mainland have also made a clear decision to boost enrolment. The number of students admitted to universities jumped to 1.6 million last year, up 47.4 per cent from the year before. The National Planning and Development Commission forecasts the number of undergraduates will rise to 1.8 million this year.

Hong Kong went through a similar climb in enrolment in the early 1980s. Back then, less than two per cent of 18- to 20-year-olds received a tertiary education. Now 18 per cent do. The rapid expansion of enrolment has been blamed for the allegedly declining quality of local university graduates.

Will the mainland follow Hong Kong on this point? So far, the issue has raised little concern because the enrolment rate on the mainland is still relatively low. Only about nine per cent of those of college-age enter university.

'The percentage of mainland students entering universities is still very low. The declining standard of university students is not as critical on the mainland as in Hong Kong,' says Feng Zengjun, the director of research at the Institute of International and Comparative Education.

Gary Cheung ([email protected]) is a staff writer for the Post's news desk. Sara French ([email protected]) is a staff writer for the Post's Editorial Pages